Laravel Zero is a Laravel-based framework for building command line applications. You can find applications built with it and resources to start with it in here.
Testing commands can be a pretty straightforward task or a total headache. Let’s see why.
The problem
Laravel provides an easy way to test your commands as you can see in the following example extracted from the official documentation.
public function test_console_command()
{
$this->artisan('question')
->expectsQuestion('What is your name?', 'Taylor Otwell')
->expectsQuestion('Which language do you program in?', 'PHP')
->expectsOutput('Your name is Taylor Otwell and you program in PHP.')
->assertExitCode(0);
}This is an efficient way to test when you are generating the command output by yourself, but what if you depend on some external source like a database or web service? You can’t simply “expect an output” when you don’t even know what the output will be.
Starting from the start
Step 1
The first thing we need to do is create a new project.
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel-zero/laravel-zero weather-cliThe second thing to do if we follow the TDD approach is to create a feature test to define our walking skeleton.
namespace Tests\Feature;use Tests\TestCase;class WeatherCommandTest extends TestCase
{
/** @test */
public function it_can_get_the_weather()
{
$this->artisan('weather', ['city' => 'San Diego'])
->expectsOutput('Thunderstorm, Min temperature: 14.50, Max temperature: 24.80')
->assertExitCode(0);
}
}Step 2
Perfect, now if we run our tests obviously we are going to have errors because the weather command does not exist yet, the following command will create it.
php artisan weather-cli make:command WeatherCommand
Step 3
Now we have the command, before to start consuming the API we need an HTTP client, we could install an existing one like Guzzle HTTP, but we will stick to The KISS principle for this example, so we will define the most basic implementation for our needs.
We will define an interface and a concrete implementation for our HTTP client, the most simple implementation could look like this:
namespace App\Http;interface HttpClientInterface
{
public function get(string $url): string;
}namespace App\Http;class HttpClient implements HttpClientInterface
{
public function get(string $url): string
{
$curl = curl_init(); curl_setopt_array($curl, [
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_URL => $url
]); return curl_exec($curl);
}
}Perfect, now we have to request data from two endpoints.
Step 4
This endpoint will give us a woeid to represent the city.https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/search/?query=our-cityThis endpoint will give us the actual information about the weather in the city.https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/our-woeid/As the API will return the data in JSON format we will need to parse it, we can define a simple JsonParser like the following:
namespace App\Parsers;class JsonParser
{
public static function parse(string $JSONString): array
{
return json_decode($JSONString, true);
}
}Now we have to define two DTOs to store the response of the API calls, the first will be CityInformation and the second Weather, they will look like this.
namespace App\DTO;class CityInformation
{
public $title;
public $locationType;
public $woeid;
public $lattLong; public function __construct($title, $locationType, $woeid, $lattLong)
{
$this->title = $title;
$this->locationType = $locationType;
$this->woeid = $woeid;
$this->lattLong = $lattLong;
}
}namespace App\DTO;class Weather
{
public $stateName;
public $minTemp;
public $maxTemp;
public $theTemp; public function __construct($stateName, $minTemp, $maxTemp, $theTemp)
{
$this->stateName = $stateName;
$this->minTemp = $minTemp;
$this->maxTemp = $maxTemp;
$this->theTemp = $theTemp;
}
}Step 5
Now we should bind our HttpClient to the service container, that way we can use it via dependency injection in our command. This is one of the most important steps in our path to test dynamic commands.
namespace App\Providers;use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
public function register()
{
$this->app->bind(
'App\Http\HttpClientInterface',
'App\Http\HttpClient'
);
}
}Step 6
Perfect, now (finally) we are ready to get back to our WeatherCommand and consume the API. This will be the implementation:
namespace App\Commands;use App\Http\HttpClientInterface;
use App\DTO\CityInformation;
use App\DTO\Weather;
use App\Parsers\JsonParser;
use Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule;
use LaravelZero\Framework\Commands\Command;class WeatherCommand extends Command
{
protected $signature = 'weather {city}'; protected $description = 'Get the weather for a city'; private $client; public function __construct(HttpClientInterface $client)
{
$this->client = $client; parent::__construct();
} public function handle()
{
$cityResponse = $this->client->get(
"https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/search/?query=".urlencode($this->argument('city'))
);
$cityData = JsonParser::parse($cityResponse);
$cityInformation = new CityInformation(
$cityData[0]['title'],
$cityData[0]['location_type'],
$cityData[0]['woeid'],
$cityData[0]['latt_long']
); $weatherResponse = $this->client->get("https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/{$cityInformation->woeid}/");
$weatherData = JsonParser::parse($weatherResponse);
$weather = new Weather(
$weatherData['consolidated_weather'][0]['weather_state_name'],
number_format($weatherData['consolidated_weather'][0]['min_temp'], 2),
number_format($weatherData['consolidated_weather'][0]['max_temp'], 2),
number_format($weatherData['consolidated_weather'][0]['the_temp'], 2)
); $this->line(sprintf(
'%s, Min temperature: %s, Max temperature: %s',
$weather->stateName,
$weather->minTemp,
$weather->maxTemp
));
}
}At this point if you run the weather command it should work, for example:
php weather-cli weather "San Diego"Output:
Light Cloud, Min temperature: 12.82, Max temperature: 20.78But our test is still not working:
vendor/bin/phpunitOutput:
PHPUnit 7.4.3 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors..F 2 / 2 (100%)Time: 1.43 seconds, Memory: 12.00MBThere was 1 failure:1) Tests\Feature\WeatherCommandTest::it_can_get_the_weather
Output "Thunderstorm, Min temperature: 14.50, Max temperature: 24.80" was not printed./home/max/projects/weather-cli/vendor/laravel-zero/foundation/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Testing/Concerns/InteractsWithConsole.php:51
/home/max/projects/weather-cli/vendor/laravel-zero/foundation/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Testing/TestCase.php:139FAILURES!
Tests: 2, Assertions: 4, Failures: 1. PHPUnit\Framework\AssertionFailedError : Output "Thunderstorm, Min temperature: 14.50, Max temperature: 24.80" was not printed.Step 7
Now we have to fake the implementation of our HttpClient, since we are binding this class via the service container we have to create a service provider and bind it to the container while we're testing.
namespace Tests\Fakes;use App\Http\HttpClientInterface;
use App\Providers\AppServiceProvider;class FakeServiceProvider extends AppServiceProvider
{
/**
* Register any application services.
*
* @return void
*/
public function register(): void
{
$this->app->bind('App\Http\HttpClientInterface', function () {
return new class implements HttpClientInterface
{
public function get(string $url): string
{
if ($url == 'https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/search/?query=San+Diego') {
return $this->getCityInformationData();
} if ($url == 'https://www.metaweather.com/api/location/2487889/') {
return $this->getWeatherData();
}
} private function getCityInformationData()
{
return '[{"title":"San Diego","location_type":"City","woeid":2487889,"latt_long":"32.715691,-117.161720"}]';
} private function getWeatherData()
{
return '{"consolidated_weather":[{"id":4866121622618112,"weather_state_name":"Thunderstorm","weather_state_abbr":"lc","wind_direction_compass":"NE","created":"2018-11-14T12:08:35.108768Z","applicable_date":"2018-11-14","min_temp":14.50000000,"max_temp":24.80000,"the_temp":19.075,"wind_speed":5.2266084718735915,"wind_direction":49.77025406533666,"air_pressure":1007.6800000000001,"humidity":21,"visibility":17.14238845144357,"predictability":70}]}';
}
};
});
}
}First we are extending our AppServiceProvider and overriding the register method, then we are telling the container to use an anonymous class when we require an implementation of App\Http\HttpClientInterface.
The final step is to register the FakeServiceProvider to the container, but only while we are testing:
namespace Tests;use Illuminate\Contracts\Console\Kernel;
use Tests\Fakes\FakeServiceProvider;trait CreatesApplication
{
public function createApplication()
{
$app = require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php'; $app->register(FakeServiceProvider::class);
$app->make(Kernel::class)->bootstrap(); return $app;
}
}Now if we run our tests, everything should be just fine.
vendor/bin/phpunitOutput:
PHPUnit 7.4.3 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors... 2 / 2 (100%)Time: 159 ms, Memory: 12.00MBPost-credits
This is a sample application made with the sole purpose of explaining how to test commands with dynamic output in Laravel and Laravel Zero, there are a lot of things that should be done in another way in a real application, for example our HttpClientis not making any kind of validation or catching any kind of exceptions, if something goes wrong the program will fail; we're not defining an interface for our parser, in a real application probably you want to do that; we are hardcoding a fake implementation of HttpClient in our FakeServiceProvider, in a real application you don't want to do that; and finally, in a real application you want to write unit tests for every one of your classes.
Also in a real application you probably want to use a real Http client like GuzzleHttp and focus on your business logic instead of waste time reinventing the wheel.
That’s the way I test commands with dynamic output, do you know a better approach? I would love to learn yours, don’t doubt in reaching me!
Source: Medium; Max
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